Does the prison ‘pipeline’ start in the home or at school?

At a recent DeKalb summit on shutting down the schoolto-prison pipeline, county commissioner Gregory Adams recalled how he was “playing sports, chasing girls and eating” when he was 14 years old. Now, he said, we’re sending teens that age to prison.

“The youth being funneled out of the public schools into the juvenile and criminal justice systems are disproportionately children of color,” said Adams.

“It’s important for government to partner with the school system ... to begin the process of healing. Seventy-eight percent of the prison inmates didn’t graduate out of school. The dropout rate is terrible.”

But is the problem a schoolto-prison pipeline or a hometo-prison pipeline? Can schools overcome dysfunctional families, an often indifferent criminal justice system and a culture of poverty?

Omar Howard, a felon whose efforts with at-risk youth earned him a pardon a year ago, said any effort to divert kids from crime has to consider the home setting. “Let’s just get real,” he said. “Education doesn’t start when you go to school. Education starts at home. That is where a lot

of people start struggling. Parents will come and disrupt a whole school about a cellphone being taken from their child, but they won’t come to a PTA meeting.”

After he was released from prison and mentoring troubled kids, Howard examined his own childhood and asked his mother, “Did you realize you never spent any time with me? Never asked me about my grades? We never went out on a dinner date. But if I lied to you about a teacher mistreating me, you would be down at the school.”

Criminologist and Kennesaw State University professor Tanja Link said children coming from troubled homes can be anxious, depressed and deprived. But schools cannot necessarily deal with children at the depth and constancy that their mental health requires, said Link.

Many adults are still trying to make sense of what shaped their lives, so we can’t expect children in the midst of trauma to easily articulate what’s happening, said Link. “School counselors, teachers and individuals working with these problems have limited experience. While they can see the evident issues, really getting to the sources of the issues can take a long time.”

Public health physician and Morehouse School of Medicine professor Jewel Crawford said educators are not trained to do social work and mental health assessments. “I think the public health community and medical community have not really stepped up,” she said. “Every school needs a nurse, a psychologist, and counselors who don’t have caseloads of 5,000 students.”

No other nation puts so many social responsi- bilities on schools, which may explain why so many countries outpace us in math and reading. While the core function of their classrooms remains instruction, U.S. schools are being asked to deal